I was reminded today that we’ve had folks on M.b for over 2 years, and the public launch anniversary is just around the corner. Thanks everyone for your support. I’m in this for the long haul… Looking forward to celebrating many milestones over the next decade.

Submitted the new Micro.blog for iOS 13 to Apple. Not totally sure it will be approved right away because of everything new, but crossing my fingers. Daniel and I talk about some of the potential issues on the next Core Int.

Last year after Twitter changed their streaming API so that apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot could no longer use it, I blogged that I wanted to do everything I could to support third-party Micro.blog apps:

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With that in mind, I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to offer a push notification service for developers. iOS and Android developers could upload their push notification credentials from Apple and Google. Micro.blog would store them and deliver push notifications directly to third-party apps.

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That is now a reality. Today there’s a new beta of Gluon for Micro.blog that includes push notifications. Micro.blog sends the notifications on behalf of Gluon so developer Vincent Ritter doesn’t need to run his own server.

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The other popular iOS app for Micro.blog is the open source Icro. I’ve added a comment to this Icro issue on GitHub with details on the new API. I’m looking forward to working with anyone building native apps for Micro.blog to enable push notifications for their app.

I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since Brent Simmons announced JSON Feed. In the first months after the spec was released there was a lot of activity on GitHub and interest from developers. The format has proven really useful in Micro.blog, in feed readers like Feedbin or Brent’s own NetNewsWire 5, and just to make it easier to build new web tools.

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We’ve received some great feedback, and I’ve been reviewing a bunch of the issues on GitHub. There are a few things that we want to incorporate into the spec. I’ve posted a list of proposed changes over on GitHub.

Xcode 11 crashes when I try to run on the device with the iOS 13 beta, so this week I’ve resorted to TestFlight builds and printf-style debugging to troubleshoot Sign in with Apple. Very slow, but I didn’t want to jump to 13.1 quite yet.

Disappointing loss for team USA against France. I was worried this might happen after watching a couple of the other close games. Single-elimination is tough. But they did qualify for the 2020 Olympics. 🏀

I’ve already talked myself out of pre-ordering the iPhone 11 Pro this week. Looking forward to upgrading later, though. Just want to save a few bucks first and focus on these iOS 13 updates before I get distracted with a new phone.

We’ve been rewriting some old parts of Sunlit to fix bugs and get the app ready for new features. The beta includes a few improvements that we’ll release in the next week or so before iOS 13. You can sign up on TestFlight to help test.

Richard Williams passed away a couple of weeks ago. The day after, my family and I went to see the Animation Show of Shows at the Alamo Drafthouse. It was a wonderful collection of films — beautiful to experimental, funny or thoughtful, with a variety of different mediums.

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But thinking about it now, none of the short films were really in the painstaking hand-drawn style of Richard Williams, who had incredibly high standards for what animation could be. He would embrace doing the work of drawing every frame, with few holds or shortcuts.

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The films in the show weren’t trying to do that, and that’s fine. But I hope someone again picks up the depth and quality that Richard Williams brought to the industry. I blogged about him back in 2013, and I remain inspired today.

Thanks to @DaveWoodX for the reminder that we need more people to vote for getting the Micro.blog icon added to FontAwesome. If you have a GitHub account, it takes just a few seconds to click 👍 on this. Thanks!